Sunday, 20 August 2017

Friday, 4 August 2017

'The photographic industry - its exhibitions, galleries,
publications and auctions - employs thousands of women, but champions
mostly men. To begin to redress the balance, here is a timely
presentation of the work of over 30 female photographers working today.
This book is predominantly a celebration of some of the most
inquisitive, intelligent and daring photography being created now. The
stories the photographers tell are the most pressing social, political
and personal issues seen through the female lens (...)There is a recurring theme throughout the book that
serves to unite these extraordinary women and their work: the
exploration of marginalized individuals and under-discussed subjects,
seen by fresh eyes.

Monday, 5 June 2017

Saturday, 3 June 2017

Notes to a friend, January '17.

Dear G., hope you're well. Read your first two correspondences. Very interesting! They
made me think further around this idea of an emotionality of images,
something on my mind a lot in general. I was waiting for this to
make an appearance in due course, particularly since you were navigating
'ertraeumte' or 'traumatisierte' images. Does something become bare
(i.e. material) only when it is found outside of oneself and when albeit
being political it holds no personal memory to its 'new author'? Then
what is this all when one operates on sick images found inside oneself
(from within the family, let's say), and how does the material agency
shift through imbued memory / the experienced? Are the pictures suddenly
embedded with another layer, something that emerges in between the
photographic and the photographed, the found and the rescued, the lost
and the remembered? This may hint at a materiality that is also
emotionality because of the personal.

My father used to photograph; years ago I rescued his archives. He no longer wanted
them. He lost his sense of smell as a child.
With this, it seems, he also lost the memory of 'paster 'things. We
started a dialogue when the archives changed hands. His picture-making was
not to help him remember something once it had passed, but it was
perhaps truly to witness the present; to be (making images as
being-in-the-world). I would scan an image and send it to him; in
return he'd tell me something about it if he could. Mostly there
was only the absence of memory, so we would make new meaning for the picture
in question. His navigating the lack of memory would imply a sort
of radical rationality - he'd study the image, and by assessing the size
of the river in the background, he would 'locate' it (the image). This
allowed him to place it within a certain time-frame, at least, by logic.

Last year or the year before, he sent me a batch he had newly 'discovered'.
The negatives show signs of water-damage (some severe). Are these
photographs doubly-sick, by lack of image and by lack of memory? Or
doubly-material? Did he author them (perhaps his partner did), and does this matter? In his mind they're his, connected to nowhere. Maybe by losing their represented
twice, they now belong only in a more general way. To me, their
emotionality has intensified by my agony of a 'close distance', if you
will. Their watercolour-esque surfaces, chaotic and deep, are at once (a
kind of) memory turned material and material turned forgetting.

Tuesday, 21 March 2017

Don McCullin, title unknown to me, exact date unknown to me.
I saw this picture in his retrospective at Arles in France last year, and found
myself in front of it for eight days straight.

Unknown woman in a room, you whom I’ve seen through someone
else’s mind and eyes, you whom I can’t forget – it is as if I knew you. It’s
been a year, and when I close my eyes at night, I see you. I think myself into
your world, one that has been and gone, and that remains. I can smell the room in
which you stand – old, damp, tired; it has seen a lot and has survived; it
bears all the signs of a fighter; look, there, the crumbling and tumbling wall
sighs under the weight of the role of the witness; I can see it breathing,
heavy, in and out (wait, are you breathing in sync, such as lovers might in the
most intimate of unconscious gestures?) – cold old stone mustering against
itself to lend you, woman, something known to lean on.

Is this your home? You belong, and yet you don’t. You are
there, and still you aren’t. Your face, like that of the stone, bears legacy
and weight of war. Not hopeless for it lives, but it is marked by a great
melancholy. You are made made up–
for the photographer’s visit? Your hair combed back, the skirt, the shining
shoe. These shoes – whom are they shining for; a love, the stranger’s presence,
a child? Who shined them? Something tells me it was
you. Your gaze is warm and distant both, there and here but gone. Unknown woman in a room who
burns behind my retina – what have you seen?

To your left wrist clings a watch, marker of time and death,
alien and dislocated, it seems beyond your era; from now, not from then. Its
imminence seems double-fold; did an unknown future drop it
into the scene while no one cared to look, and what is its role against your skin? Your
melancholy and your arms, the way they hold each other, remind of Picasso’s
Woman with folded arms, 1902, Blue Period. Have your eyes read this work of
art? Your scorny legs so close and straight – they make me feel an
absence stronger still.

You, unknown woman in a room, I hear the sound of yet another
clock, its ticking as untried as the silent presence of your watch. Together
they count down to death, every tik one step closer to wet earth. But wait, I hear distant children too, some commotion in the hallway maybe,
close but muffled. The tiny flat is one of many; crammed and modest, but still
a sacred cave; your lover, after all.

The table you stand near to – it’s ever so telling! One
setting only, either done or waiting to feed; either hastily shoved aside for
the outsider’s visit, or waiting to be used, once he has left. Who is it for;
you, a child, a friend, a lover? Are you alone, are you together? Are you in
waiting, are you in mourning? Did someone die, did many die? One thing I know –
you and the wall, you both have seen. You share a striking patience, and the
look of knowing.

What are those coats or clothes behind you, hanging? Dark,
like deep wraps, like ghosts, are they another marker of loss, or does it only seem that way to me?

Everything around you, unknown woman in a room, is in
waiting. Time stands silently still, and yet the being-there of your future-
watch is one of utmost urgency. The past, the present, the future – all of them
are written here, and none. Past and future in the present, present and future
in the past…and so it goes. Is it for them that the table is dressed?

And then there’s this, the greatest and perhaps most easily
overlooked: the repetition. So perfect, so aligned that only visible when
studied for long and scrutinised with an eye that can’t let off – there is one
form that weaves throughout the scene of you like the ceaseless song of a
cricket in high heat; the V. Can you see it? Here it is, in the paper ineffably
clothing the wall. Here it is, in the front most part of the tablecloth,
protruding out to us; a V. Here, lopsided, a trod mark on the floor. Here it
is, in the bits of walldress eaten by time. Here it is, like body ornament
layered around your legs; your veins. And here, finally, in your face, both
ways. One V down, one V up. The strange man that came to make your picture –
his eye is honest, tender and compassionate. He recognised the
tired stone, the V, and you.

The scene before our eyes is naked as the house, signed of
loss and scarcity and grief, but also signed of hope, strength and humanity. We’re
given clues but not too many. Something is suggested but leaves me wanting
more; burns your face into my half-sleep. In the dark I lie and see you leaning
with the wall, quietly breathing in sync, in and out, through time and time and
time. I’m IN your photograph, me and the present, in presence of history. I think I smell a faint whiff of burnt coal.
The picture informs but more, it makes me feel. What is denoted is an unfixed
state, a questionmark, a story told and left untold.

You, unknown woman with the wall, are insignia of the nature
of story - written and lost somehow, and found again. Right here then lie offering
and agony of stories from and in and with the world: forever fragmented, always
unearthed and lost in translation.

You, unnamed woman with the wall, your life was real, you
mattered. Through the eyes of the stranger that connect us, I am assumed the
ultimate gift: I cannot know you, but I think I know you now. Your image burns.

Sunday, 12 March 2017

Thursday, 9 March 2017

Perimeter is thrilled to continue its new programming initiative for 2017: Perimeter Talks.
Taking place approximately once a month on a Sunday afternoon, the
series features lectures, panel discussions and more casual
in-conversations with publishers, artists, curators, designers, writers
and editors. The talks explore and address various themes and issues
relating to contemporary photographic, art and design publishing –
helping demystify, challenge and offer insight into publishing as a
medium and a practice.

Our second talk for 2017 features Melbourne-based German photographer Katrin Koenning, whose debut book Astres Noir (Chose Commune, Paris) – which drew upon images that Koenning and Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick
had made for their Instagram feeds – went on to become an international
phenomenon, making the final shortlist of the prestigious 2016 Paris Photo-Aperture Photo Book Award and winning the 2016 Australian Photobook of the Year Award.
The talk will explore the making of the project, Koenning's wider
practice and the bleed between Instagram and more traditional
photographic contexts.

Right now, no matter where we are, we find ourselves in a fireball of
political confusion that sees us descending rapidly into liberal
authoritarianism, fascism and border-euphoria, and in which humanism is
under grave threat. It seems all the more important then to find and
draw on what connects us. United in a new and bottomless placelessness
(whether physical, metaphorical or virtual), our mechanisms of exclusion
and our judgement of each other are still so fiercely place-attached. In this instalment of the festival, following on from examining
Revelations, we are concerned with expanded and creative thinking around
notions of New Citizen. We ask: who are we as humans? How did we come
to be this way, where are we headed? What does it mean to be participant
of an utterly computerised 21st Century that pulls us ever closer
together, yet paradoxically, even further apart? In this era, our
collective knowledge is richer than it ever was, yet we’ve lost sight of
ourselves. Are we traversing an ocean of possibility while sinking
under our own weight? In a world where the borders of real and imagined
are incessantly blurring yet sharper than ever defined, is the very
concept of belonging itself drifting away from the physical realm into
another? Perhaps New Citizen is the individual we ought to strive to be. As a
species wandering dangerously close to the edge of itself, New Citizen
cannot be understood as a label or fixed term. New Citizen encourages: a
politic of transformation and a thinking of indefiniteness of what
describes identity and ultimately us as humans; a humanity of insiders
concerned about the state of a distressed world in which politicisation
of space and violent legacy of white dominance have long caused the
mentioned to require new balance. It is about us as a society,
addressing the collective state of urgency in which we find ourselves.
In this sense, New Citizen advocates a need of breaking out, of acting,
of mobilising towards a new and shared horizon. The New Citizen is
global more than ever, a cosmopolite; a human being most of all who
always comes from story. We are calling for the artist-communicator equipped with the power of
language to show us a voice of dissent, challenging and foraging
against the very things that are made by systems in power to keep us
divided. We ask for your views of a New Citizen that far extend the
conventional understandings of its ‘origin-definition’ which is confined
to state and city and town; we ask you to think citizen as a
anywhere-human, beyond entitlement, nationality or allegiance to
government. Show us counter-language; a new way of navigating what it
means to be alive and to live in a (post)capitalist, climate-changed
21st Century world. Whatever your photographic approach may be, show us
new dialogues and new imaginaries. We ask: who or what are we as image-makers reflecting on the world in
which we live? Where are our stories of unmapping, our stories of
stories? How do we navigate this world of image and this world of World as people drawing from the toolset of communication? What is it like to be, now, as New Citizen in this, our time? What are
our responsibilities, collectively and individually, to the world and to
each other, in and towards a change of course? And what kind of boat can carry us together into the world of World that needs us less than ever? - Katrin Koenning